A wide variety of medical procedures involve the supplying of a treatment fluid into a body lumen of a patient. Peripheral intervention techniques in the human cardiovascular system represent one class of medical procedures where supplying of a treatment fluid is well known for a variety of purposes. For instance, thrombolytic agents are commonly delivered by way of infusion into a vein or artery for the purpose of breaking up and/or dissolving clot material. Another peripheral intervention procedure involves supplying a chemotherapeutic agent which may be carried by blood flow to a treatment site of interest such as a tumor. Peripheral intervention commonly entails percutaneous access to a patient's cardiovascular system. A great many different devices and techniques have been developed over the years for percutaneously accessing treatment sites, and supplying treatment fluids such as the thrombolytic and chemotherapeutic agents mentioned above. Some of these strategies have met with great success in certain treatment contexts, but improvements could be made in others.
Many body tissues are relatively insensitive to the effects of certain treatment agents such as dyes, saline, and others. Other treatment agents may be relatively toxic regardless of tissue type. Such toxicity is not entirely unintended, as in the case of chemotherapeutic agents. Chemotherapeutics are typically designed to kill tumor cells, but can often also damage healthy tissue. While certain thrombolytic agents might not necessarily be considered “toxic,” they can have deleterious effects on various parts of the body such as by inducing bleeding. The desire to avoid overuse of certain treatment agents, and avoid their administration outside of target locations, will thus be readily apparent. Such overuse or extraneous administration, however, remains relatively common due to at least in part to difficulty in accessing certain parts of the body, difficulty in controlling flow of treatment fluids in vivo, and incomplete uptake of treatment agents by targeted tissues.